A pack of naked hot dog people, attacking a lone male camper in the woods? Shiny long sausages, tackling him to the ground? You don’t have to be Freudian to see that this obviously is a phallic nightmare. In fact, the obviousness of that latent subtext is so much in the foreground, that it may even occlude the overt message here: the ad’s “narrative” is suggesting that you should not attempt to eat a whole “pack” of “dogs” when you go camping, else they will get their revenge on you. But if you do…Tums can shield and protect you from the heartburn pain.

The return of the repressed is a kind of acid reflux — you ate something you should not have, and it has come back to haunt you. What makes all this uncanny is that the symbolism of the “dog” is literalized, in the way the commercial depicts this food as animal. The dogs “bark at the moon” in the stunning opening shot, where a crouching nude body stands in contrast to an unusually large full moon, with all the sexual repression latent in the way it’s showing his “buns.” This is the stuff of not only Sigmund Freud, but also werewolf literature, and not acid reflux remedies…but in the magic system of advertising, all commercial products — from foods (Pillsbury Doughboy) to batteries (Energizer Bunny) — can be living creatures, like something possessed with the power they want you to believe the product has… akin to something supernatural. This is what is meant by commodity fetishism: attributing supernatural agency to consumer goods, and reifying the systems of production that can magically solve all your everyday problems.

But unlike the usual supernaturalization of product spokesmen (like we get with many other medications, like the “gut man” for Xifaxan — here’s a good commercial example), Tums doesn’t give us some magical walking “tummy”. Instead the disturbing creatures are foods that are aggressive and hostile and must be vanquished. The Hot Dog commercial cited above is but one of a series of “Food Fight” advertisements from Tums antacid that treat foods as large (clearly costumed) ambulatory creatures. Other ads show headless dead chickens, belligerent tacos, bullish T-Bones, and feisty little Italian meatballs. In every case, consumers must defend themselves from food that attacks them, and the tablets of Tums are framed as a kind of magical shield. The man in the Hot Dog commercial literally holds a “torch” in one hand and the tiny Tums Smoothies package in the other before him, the way Van Helsing holds up a torch and a cross to keep a vampire at bay!

Product as magical shield.

The ad condenses its narrative so swiftly that there are some disjunctive cuts — in one shot, “when heartburn comes creeping up on you,” the camper is tackled and overtaken by the pack of dogs, who seem to scrabble over his groin; then a cut shows him on his feet, holding the Tums jar aloft to chase them away. As we try to put together what just happened in the gap across the cut, which has all the suggestion of a kind of rape, if not murder — the advertisement switches into “scientific demonstration” mode to offer an explanation: through animation, it shows a dissolving tablet morphing into ghost-like magic tendrils that encircle the pain and sphinctering in on flames to extinguish them; the voiceover claims this is how the antacid “neutralizes stomach acid at its source.” Afterward, the medicated man blows out his hot dog stick-slash-torch, symbolically blowing out the “burn” of said stomach acid with a satisfied smile. Then the infamous “tum-ta-tum-tum” chorus closes out the ad. Importantly, this jingle is reminiscent of the Dragnet theme, associating the product in our cultural memory with a power akin to the “protectors” from law enforcement or the shield of the police, and, playing out over the image of the Tums logo and Smoothies product, it gets the final say.

The micro-ghosts of medicine at work.

While these Tums commercials are all about force, battle and aggression, they are uniformly framed as “defensive” actions, projecting the conservative impulse to “protect” ourselves from a threat. Often in ads, these threats are associated with abstractly gendered, sexual tensions — from the meatballs and steaks that interrupt men on a date, challenging their masculinity, to the virtual gang rape of a man by ambulatory phalluses while alone in the woods. (It is interesting to contrast this against the Tums Taco advert, where the less phallic, more yonic, Taco tackles women — until one picks up a guitar and beats the Mexican entree, ending in a liberated, libidinal Mariachi dance).

These commercials are depicting “monster battles” and the more one thinks about the way they really are treating food as limbless, eyeless, headless creatures the more nightmarish they might become. But what they are really doing is representing these edible Others as containable threats, for they are human, but “less than human.” This manages to counterbalance the weirdness of monstrous bodies against the realm of comedy, resulting in an unsettling but chuckle-worthy sense of uncanniness. (Contributing to the unsettled nature of this is our repressed awareness that what we eat is also something that once lived — other animals, who once lived and breathed just like us — organic forms whose bodies have been sacrificed and repurposed into objects for our consumption (and then in these ads, monstrously reborn all over again as part-human, part-entree hybirds). The humor is enacted by virtue of excessive and ludicrous imagery, the mode of parody in the Dragnet and Dracula references, and even the babytalk inherent to the product’s naming: Tums “Smoothies.” A “smoothie” is typically an organic fruit drink, not a chemical heartburn remedy, so this over-the-counter product still aligns itself with consumerism by virtue of naming its medicine as a kind of comfort food. And the term “tum” (or “tummy”) is clearly a childish way of saying “stomach.” This reassurance is regressive: it’ll all be okay in your tum-ta-tum-tum, after all, poor child-adult. Just pop this chewable pill….

In the end we are assured by the domestic comedy, and the restoration of these animistic beliefs from childhood, that these supernatural agents are harmless and that this is all just in good fun. Reassurances often take the structure of psychological disavowal when they circulate in advertising. This dreamwork logic disavows, occludes, and obfuscates the very real issue at the root of it all: that consumerism itself is often to blame for all this ulcerating acidity in the first place, and that heartburn medicine offers a “quick fix” mostly so that you can continue to over-indulge. These comical narratives are not just stories about putting the acid reflux in remission, but are stories about the power of the consumer product to repress guilt over unconscious desire, in order that we might indulge our fantasies and consume all over again, even when we consciously know that what we are doing might be harmful and “come back to haunt us” later. They perfectly embody the popular uncanny.

The Onion’s AV Club ran a great list of “23 Ridiculous Horror Movies” called “Night of the Killer Lamp” back in 2007. It’s actually a great list of films that would make for a fun marathon night of creepy-kookie horror films. What it proves, too, is that a) the horror genre is rife with “uncanny” objects at the center of their narratives (e.g. possessed dolls, plants and animals that have human agency, inanimate objects that move of their own accord, etc.), and that, b) the uncanny is often funny…especially when it fails.

One of many on the list is Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive, which is hilarious but in my view also a very important film in the pantheon of the uncanny (see my essay in the book, The Films of Stephen King). For a quick example, here’s the soda machine scene, from youtube.

So how does it fail? Is a killer soda machine not scary? If not, what makes it inherently goofy?

I won’t go into a close reading of this particular scene. It’s easy enough to understand through the theory of the uncanny itself. One answer might be that the uncanny — like all fiction — requires a willing suspension of disbelief…but that the ideas here are so ludicrous that we are unwilling to do so. If our mental mastery remains in charge of our experience, keeping the “belief” in animistic actions at bay, then we invest no autonomous power or agency into the object.

In other words, we know they are puppets on a string. We must genuinely believe that the string has been cut when the puppet starts to dance in order to truly experience the uncanny.

Special effects are always attempting to cut that string. The low budget nature of these films (or simply their datedness, as effects have evolved) may prevent us from believing in their magic.

Even so, it may not be fair to entirely dismiss all the “killer lamp” films as simply “ridiculous.” There are moments in each of them — some more than others — where the uncanny can be experienced due mostly to the power of cinema technology to animate inanimate objects and thereby bring them to life. Hardcore realists might be too steeled up against the ludicrous to really suspend disbelief, but there remains something regressive about these films that might account for their sense of being ludicrous in the first place. They are aggressively regressive. They force us to engage in a childlike belief in the worlds they project. They work hard to resurrect our childish (or as Freud put it, “surmounted”) beliefs in a world where anything can potentially hold life and move on its own. Our laughter may very well be a defense mechanism against this return to our earlier beliefs — an attempt to affirm that our adult selves have surmounted them, in collective laughter.

Freud: “…a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and…there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.”

When I first saw this twisted comedic film, I laughed at its outrageousness. You might be horrified or you might guffaw. It speaks for itself in a mere five seconds. Here’s it is: 5SecondFilms’“Magic Show Volunteer” (2009):

After I recoiled from the unexpected in this “magic show,” I immediately wanted to share it with others. I had the “you’ve gotta see this” reaction that compels so many of us to share these sorts of things online in social media. I copied the link and was ready to press “send” on my twitter account. But then I realized something. It was a magic show skit. Hadn’t I seen something like this before?

And I had. Many of us have. These kinds of films, which are everywhere on the internet because so many people have access to the technology to make them now, are identical to the very first movies ever made. Here, for example, is a famous example from about 115 years ago, when the early “one reelers” were being exhibited to public amazement: George Melies’ “The Magician” (1898):

Just as early film makers were exploring the creative capacity of the medium, today millions are doing the same thing — with a range of success and failure — using the ubiquitous capacities of phone apps, tablets, webcams, camcorders and similar devices which can point, shoot, edit and share with an audience in a matter of minutes. I have one myself, and I’m playing around with it quite a bit, which is also leading me to start researching this stuff on youtube (subscribe to my channel) more and more. What I’m finding is that the most successful of them exploit editing and sound in order to trick the eye and confound expectations, which give them a foot in the cinema of the uncanny.

In writing about early cinema, film critic Tom Gunning termed this genre the “cinema of attractions” — film’s equivalent to the circus sideshow, where the spectacle is everything and the narrative is scant or completely unnecessary. Before roughly 1906, film had not yet converted over to the dominant narrative format that we know so well in most Hollywood films today, which continues to draw from 19th Century narrative structure. YouTube makes no such pretense (perhaps because when it got started, YouTube would limit postings to 5 minutes in length, which led to widespread sharing of quirky videos akin to America’s Funniest Home Videos — which, incidentally, just aired it’s 500th episode — more than anything else). The bulk of the experience of such shared videos cues its viewers in much the same way as the early cinema of attractions, especially in its reference to the “magic” of what we are shown.

In her essay, “You Tube: The New Cinema of Attractions,” critic Theresa Rizzo does a masterful job both situating such videos into the tradition of this genre, but also exploring what marks online video sharing as unique: “although YouTube clips arrest our attention and encourage us to gawk similarly through novelty and curiosity throughout the course of a day, they also invite us to respond and participate in a variety of ways.” Thus, instead of turning to your neighbor in the theater seats and saying “wow,” we can say “wow” (and much more) right back to the filmmakers in an online comment or foment our own viral marketing campaign through an international form of “word of mouth” advertising on facebook, twitter, and elsewhere. Such shared videos can also be remediated — transported into different media or even remixed. “The cinema of attractions is ultimately about acts of display, or exhibitionism rather than storytelling in a similar way remediation is all about showing off by being clever and creative. It is a self-conscious practice that points to the producer, itself and to the power of the medium.”

I am, of course, fascinated and enthralled by short cinema and all the online activity we see with such texts. I think there is a grand democratization of art happening right now, which is wonderful (despite my skepticism about much of it — see my essay “Mock Band: The Simulation of Artistic Processes” for more on that). But the main interest for me is the role of the uncanny in communicating “the power of the medium”…which often is figured as a technology with autonomous, supernatural agency. This power is interesting to read as a symptom of social or personal anxiety, and often deifies technology in ways intended to either disavow agency or sell products through commodity fetishism (e.g. consumer technology IS a commodity). Melies wasn’t selling anything but himself. His “camera” was a magic wand. Today, magic wands are camcorders in the hands of the masses, available to all — for a price — and if we want, we can “magically” edit our stories, our personal history, our record of events. This is a manifestation of the popular uncanny.

In the Five Second Film about “The Magic Show Volunteer” our spectacular laughter relies on the taboos that are encroached here, regarding violence against pregnant women. It is not so difficult to give a feminist critique to something so clearly gendered in its representation of power. The male magician, a staging of authority, literally appropriates the “uncanny” nature of organic childbirth (“popping” the belly in a horrific way (clearly a balloon is pricked) — almost as if the woman’s body was something artificial, like a doll — before ‘birthing’ the child from his mouth). This topsy-turvy figuration of “male birth” is a common trope in uncanny horror film (and reaches all the way back to Shelley’s Frankenstein). It is an aggressive fantasy that a Freudian might read as an Oedipal nightmare as much as a gross-out joke, with the “father figure” of the fanciful magician responsible for “disappearing” the child, swallowing it off screen and “magically” pulling the newborn from his throat on its umbilical tourniquet. All of this “magic” — the taboo male fantasy of the text — is performed by cinematic technology, and its placement in the cinema of attractions renders it safe, domestic…and perhaps far too easily reproduced and reinforced as a social message.

Or maybe it’s just funny, and we’re invited to laugh at the male fantasy it presents. Perhaps the gimmicky magic it offers up is mocked, and this is a parody of itself. I’m uncertain. That, too, is inherent to the uncanny.

My favorite Bizarro comic of recent days involves Mr. Peanut — that dapper mascot of Planter’s nuts — in a scenario that makes plain the inherent contradiction of advertisements that employ cartoon mascots to represent the very same products they sell.

Eating our Icons. (Comic by Dan Piraro)

What IS the appeal of these imaginary spokespeanuts and mascots and similar characters in mass advertising that embody the very same product that their companies would have us consume? How does our brain respond to the cognitive dissonance of a cartoon tunafish selling us tunafish to eat? How does the child’s brain process the implied relationship between, say, the character of Mayor McCheese in the Playland and the Quarter Pounder available at the nearby counter at the local McDonald’s restaurant? How do we disavow the “unnatural” and “disturbing” undercurrent to advertising mascots, as expressed by this surprisingly frank commercial for M&M candies from the early 2000s?

I find this advertisement — featuring Patrick Warburton (Seinfeld’s “Putty”) vastly interesting. Beyond the “unnatural” situation — which I’ll focus on in a moment — the setting of this exchange is very telling. It is located in a convenience store that seems a nostalgic throwback to the general “candy stores” of an unidentifiable past. Why does this matter? For one, it situates the story of the ad in the context of economic exchange, but one where no exchange is really happening, save for the actor’s parental scolding and taking away of the candy. The commentary feels realistic in its dark commentary, but the story is still situated in a fantasyland, and it is one which is aligned — dreamily, hazily — with the past for the viewer. The Ms are like “kids in a candyshop” and Warburton plays the adult parent who comes into the shop to scold them.

It matters quite a bit, I think, that the proprietor behind the register is not minding the store, has his back turned when Warburton walks in, and disappears quickly from the image. This allows a situation to transpire that is odd, because normally the clerk would be the one chiding the candy to stop eating the goods he is trying to sell. Instead, we have candy doing nothing at all but hungrily eating more candy, implying a scenario where “the cat is away, so the mice must play” but also providing a parody of the consumer who merely induges his desire to consume without much thought. The M&M characters are not just cannibalistically, but hedonistically indulging themselves in the store, but doing so in a way that is represented as juvenile and childish, allowing the shopper (Warburton) to take on the role of both consumer and parental authority figure, who speaks, ironically, with the voice of reason. It is as though his consumption is valid, but there’s is not an acceptable display of it. The world without consumerism — the theater of the store prior to Warburton’s arrival — is uncivilized, or as animalistic and bestial as it is cannibalistic. The consumer’s exchange — Warburton’s chiding — employs a civilizing effect on the scenario, with the “natural law” (“you don’t eat your own kind…it’s unnatural”) being applied by the consumer’s authority.

This is not the book of Deuteronomy; this is an M&Ms commercial. Commerce is the operative word. The M&M’s try to swap their “colors” but this mutual exchange is not acceptable to the consumer, because it is not a “real” exchange with any symbolic gain. There needs to be some semblance of gain: thus, the consumer takes the candy bags away — getting it all to himself in the process. The popping of an M&M on the way out the door is a symbolic reward, but it also suggests quite clearly: you don’t eat your own kind, but a superior being is free to eat the lower forms…like the juvenile, animalistic, cannibalistic, uncivilized candy. In other words, a hierarchy between parent/child and consumer/product is reaffirmed here and that is the key lesson of the commercial’s “story”: you are not free to gobble up the goods of capitalism — you need to pay for the privilege, and paying makes consumption of ANOTHER KIND perfectly okay.

In other words, it rationalizes the exploitation of the other, in a very self-congratulatory and superior way.

Perhaps I am over-analyzing what amounts to a darkly comedic joke, but often such jokes do relate to unconscious desires, and one of the lessons of the Uncanny is that laughter is just as much a response to the return of the repressed as is a scream. As this commercial and the Bizarro comic up above make clear, there is a cannibalistic undercurrent to the funny and comedic world where animated icons and product spokesmen are normalized. Why else does the Pillsbury Doughboy giggle when we put his brethren children in the oven? Why else does the Michelin Man smile when he asks us to drive on the very rubber flesh that constructs him?

Advertisers employ the literary conceit of personification and the technologies of animation (or costuming) to lend their product an aura of “life” — this, preposterously, gives these icons the implied power “beyond nature” that comes with their status. But it is not so much the living-dead commodities that are embued with this power. It is the manufacturer — the magic machinery of the dough factory, the tire factory — that are attributed with some “secret” power in the process. This is what is meant by “commodity fetishism”; we begin to treat the products of the factory as if they were created by a god or a token of a higher being, instead of something created by the hands of man. Advertising, as Raymond Williams has put it, is a magic system that perpetuates this fetishism of commodities. This may sound like a lot of weight to put onto the back of Mr. Peanut or an M&M candy, but one of the lessons of studying the popular uncanny is that the more unnecessary and empty a consumer good, the more the supernatural is drawn into its marketing and advertising to sell us on its value. If one colored bag of candy is the same as any other, then perhaps the claim that “you don’t eat your own kind” is really betraying a secret fear that this economic system really is a form of self-cannibalism, after all, by trying to disavow it through an imaginary alternative universe, where what we eat is not us, and is not ours, but something magically Other altogether.

In their latest campaign, “Enough. Is. Enough,” JC Penney is running what is, to my mind, a hilarioustelevision commercial, involving a serial montage of consumers shouting for outrageously loud and extended time periods at sales tags and other marketing tricks familiar to us all.

What makes this commercial so great is all the horror film iconography — from the ever-present scream to the use of ambulatory mannikins — to treat its, admittedly, very vague subject. I think my favorite spot involves a woman opening her mailbox and screaming at the endless stream of junk mail that pours out of it, reminiscent of horror films where rats stream out of a sewer. The commercial ranges in references to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to They Live. It is clear to me that the message is about getting rid of fine print and weaselly language in direct mail and sale materials, but judging from the commentary this campaign is generating on facebook, not everyone understands this and most people are simply annoyed by it).

The ad is really a build-up in anticipation of (as of this writing, tonight’s) “reveal” of a special change in the department store giant’s marketing structure. JCP even brashly announces on their facebook page that “On 2.1.12 we’ve got the biggest news in jcp history (Yeah. We’re talking big time here, since we’ve been around for 110 years).” This commercial also has a great tie-in app on its facebook page called “The No Meter!” in which you can literally scream “Noooo!” at the website and the meter will measure your rage and give you a cheeky comment about how potent your screams are.

Scream at JC Penney's No Meter

Whatever JCP has in store for us, I find it fascinating that this advertising campaign appropriates consumer rage at ads into an ad that is a ploy for consumer loyalty. There’s something inherently contradictory here. And it is using the appeal of tropes of the uncanny to sell us on it. But it is using more than just the directorial horror film references that one can easily spot in the commercials. It is using extratextual parlor tricks.

The No Meter is an excellent example of a modern day “fortune teller” machine, an automaton of sorts that invites humans to interact with its mechanism (or in this case, program) in order to “uncannily” respond with an interpretation of their emotions. It plays on the concept that the computer “app” can really “listen” to you and respond. It is, in other words, the domestication of the funhouse parlor trick, the exotic stuff one used to only find on Coney Island, now broadcast in your home office, living room, laptop, and cell phone.

This folksy sort of hokum reminds me of the horror movie ballyhoo of William Castle — who, in his classically campy title, The Tingler, had Vincent Price taunt audiences to “scream for your lives” by yelling at the movie screen in order to kill the monster that was loose in the theater. The gimmick — called Percepto — notoriously included wiring theater seats with joy buzzers that would go off to try to induce screaming.

I’ll be watching the development of this campaign. I can only imagine what it will be like in the shopping mall next time I visit… I suspect that fun-loving folks familiar with this stuff will scream for laughs whenever they walk in or near the store, and for as long as this cultural memory survives, the mall will echo with these goofy “nooooo!” shouts, reminiscent of a scene from Dawn of the Dead.

On the Uncanny . . .

…animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration complex comprise practically all the factors which turn something frightening into something uncanny.